A year afterward the call from Philadelphia was repeated, and all the
circumstances having changed, I went. But I learned, during those six
weeks of uncertainty about going from Syracuse to Philadelphia, a lesson
I shall never forget, and a lesson that might be useful to others in
like crisis: namely, that it is one's duty to stay where you are until
God makes it evident that you should move.

In all my life I never had one streak of good luck. But I have had a
good God watching and guiding me.

While I was living in Syracuse I delivered my first lecture. It was a
literary lecture. My ideas of a literary lecture are very much changed
from what they used to be. I used to think that a lecture ought to be
something very profound. I began with three or four lectures of that
kind in stock. My first lecture audience was in a patient community of
the town of Hudson, N.Y. All my addresses previously had been literary.
I had made speeches on literature and patriotism, and sometimes filled
the gaps when in lecture courses speakers announced failed to arrive.

But the first paid lecture was at Hudson. The fifty dollars which I
received for it seemed immense. Indeed it was the extreme price paid
anyone in those days. It was some years later in life that I got into
the lecturing field. It was always, however, subordinate to my chief
work of preaching the Gospel.

Syracuse in 1859 was the West. I felt there all the influences that are
now western. Now there is no West left. They have chased it into the
Pacific Ocean.